At the Limits of the Gaze - (Aperture Ideas) by Daniel Abbe & Franz Prichard (Paperback)

About the Book

"The first English-language volume of Takuma Nakahira's influential writings on photography. Takuma Nakahira was a crucial figure within the history of Japanese photography, best known outside of Japan as a founding member of Provoke, the experimental magazine of photographs, essays, and poetry, first published in Tokyo in 1968. Through Provoke, Nakahira deepened his artistic and personal connection to Daido Moriyama, with whom he developed a signature style of harsh and grainy black-and-white photography. He would eventually break with this style, and over the course of his decades-long career, maintain an experimental approach to photography. And yet, beyond his photographic practice, Nakahira was also a committed critic, writing on a range of topics hardly limited to photography: art, film, journalism, radical politics, television, and jazz. As a whole, the essays offer insight into the evolution of Nakahira's thinking"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

The first English-language collection of Takuma Nakahira's influential writings on photography.

At the Limits of the Gaze collects the writings of photographer and critic Takuma Nakahira in English for the first time. A crucial figure within the history of Japanese photography, Nakahira is best known outside of Japan as a founding member of Provoke, the experimental magazine of photographs, essays, and poetry, first published in 1968, and for his important photobook For a Language to Come (1970). Throughout a decades-long career, Nakahira raised incisive questions about visual culture and politics in both his photography and his writing. As part of a dynamic moment of artistic and political experimentation in Tokyo, he wrote on a range of topics hardly limited to photography: art, film, journalism, literature, politics, television, and more. Nakahira's essays brim with urgency, relentlessly interrogating photography's relationship to power, the connection between language and images, and the gaze. As editors and translators Daniel Abbe and Franz Prichard write, Nakahira's essays "both suggest doubt about, and possibilities for, a photographically mediated reckoning with the world."